Monday, November 05, 2018
Elder of Ziyon
Today's insane anti-Israel academic paper:
Pinkwashed:Yes, a "scholarly" examination of a gay Israeli porn film, the criticism of which honestly sounds like parody:
GAY RIGHTS, COLONIAL CARTOGRAPHIES AND RACIAL CATEGORIES IN THE PORNOGRAPHIC FILM MEN OF ISRAEL
Brett Remkus Britt
Journal
International Feminist Journal of Politics
Volume 17, 2015 - Issue 3
Claims regarding “gay rights” have acquired a prominent role in debates over Israel's occupation of Palestine. This often takes the form of “pinkwashing,” a term denoting the use of gay rights discourse to justify the imposition of colonial rule. This article analyzes the pornographic film Men of Israel to explore how pinkwashing reflects colonialism's depoliticizing and exclusionary logics. Men of Israel shows how pinkwashing is far more than a justificatory practice. It also legitimates, reproduces and appropriates colonial narratives to justify an alliance between supporters of gay rights and the “pro-gay” Israeli state. It simultaneously excludes a racial category of people called “Palestinians,” which includes gay Palestinians, from the rights accorded to gay men in Israel. In an era of “gay rights as human rights,” such deployments of “gay rights” highlight the necessity of directing critical scrutiny to the alliances and exclusions implicated by a particular articulation of rights.
The film’s attempt to depoliticize Israel’s territorial claims is perhaps even more important. Men of Israel reflects an important turn within contemporary colonial practices, where gay male bodies serve as markers of colonial boundaries. However, the colonial power relations implicated by the film are well disguised because, in common with other pornographic films, it elides the social and political aspects of the subjects it depicts, presenting them as “images of people without social context or relations” (Bhattacharyya 2008, 136).You get that? The porn film "elides the social and political aspects of the subjects it depicts." The target audience for the film must be very upset over that omission.
Such a portrayal requires exclusion of images that might provoke questions regarding the cost of sustaining this geography. We are not shown impoverished Palestinian towns or the remnants of bombed out Palestinian homes in the wake of Israeli air raids. The film does not show bulldozed buildings and Israeli settlements built in their place or the poverty within the occupied territories, elements upon which the vibrant urban landscape of the film is constructed. Indeed, the evasion of a Palestinian presence is a key component of the film’s agenda.According to this brilliant reviewer - who must have watched the film dozens of times in order to describe it accurately for the readers of the journal - the film isn't meant to turn on gay guys like 100% of other gay porn films. It is designed specifically to avoid showing things that sham academic who obsessively watched it would like to have seen.
Any vision of Israel that is not wholly concerned with evil Israelis running roughshod over the human rights of an enslaved Palestinian people is clearly illegitimate, according to the brilliant academics who spend scores of hours watching gay porn for their "research." (This is not the only paper that Britt has written on the subject of gay porn and its supposed political implications. He also wrote “Reading Gay Pornography as Transnational Colonial Project.”)
Amazingly, this is not the only academic paper obsessed with Men in Israel. This other paper argues that gay porn with Arab actors is meant to build bridges between the West and the East while Israeli porn tries to build walls between the two.
Really.
And a third academic paper from a third author, Nada Elia, also features an extended discussion of this film.
That is at least three academic papers, published in three separate academic journals, written by three separate academics, all obsessed over a minor Israeli gay porn film.
UPDATE: A fourth paper on the same film!
